The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  Two years before Addison took office Thomas Hardy died, and voices were raised in Westminster Abbey invoking his own invocation of the Wessex countryside:

  Precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn.

  It was in Addison’s time that glinting combine harvesters began to appear in the fields.

  *

  You hear the Borderway Mart before you see it. Driving out of Carlisle, beyond the roundabouts and small industrial units, you can hear cattle lowing and dragging their chains, and in the car park there are trucks full of bleating sheep arriving at a market that doesn’t especially want them. Inside you can’t breathe for the smell of dung: farmers move around shuffling papers, eating rolls and sausages, drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups. Some of them check advertising boards covered with details of machinery for sale, farm buildings for rent – the day-to-day evidence of farmers selling up. ‘It could be any of us selling our tractor up there,’ an old man in a tweed cap muttered at me.

  The tannoy crackled into life. ‘The sale of five cattle is starting right now in ring number one,’ the voice said. A black heifer was padding around the ring, its hoofs slipping in sawdust and shit, and the man in charge of the gate, whose overalls were similarly caked, regularly patted it on the rump to keep it moving. Farmers in wellington boots and green waxed jackets hung their arms over the bars taking notes. One or two looked more like City businessmen. The heifer was nineteen months old and weighed 430 kilos. The bidding was quick and decisive: the heifer went for 79p a kilo.

  ‘If you were here in the prime beef ring six or seven years ago,’ the auctioneer said later, ‘you would have seen the farmers getting about 120p per kilo. That is why so many of the farmers are going out of business. Four years ago, young female sheep would be going for eighty-odd pounds, and today they are averaging thirty.’

  Climbing to Rakefoot Farm outside Keswick, you see nothing but hills and, in the distance, the lakes like patches of silver; tea shops and heritage centres and Wordsworth’s Walks serve as punctuation on the hills going brown in the afternoon. Will Cockbain was sitting in front of a black range in a cottage built in 1504. ‘There are ghosts here,’ he said, ‘but they’re mostly quite friendly.’

  Will’s father bought Rakefoot Farm in 1958, but his family have been working the land around Keswick for hundreds of years. ‘There are more Cockbains in the local cemetery than anything else,’ he said, ‘and they have always been sheep farmers. Sitting here with you now, I can remember the smell of bread coming from that range, years ago, when my grandmother was here.’ Will has 1,100 Swaledale sheep and 35 suckler cows on the farm. ‘Seven thousand pounds is a figure you often hear as an annual earning for full-time farmers round here,’ he said. ‘Quite a few are on Family Credit – though not many will admit it. We farm 2,500 acres, of which we now own just 170, the rest being rented from five different landlords, including the National Trust. The bigger part of our income comes from subsidies we get for environmental work – keeping the stone walls and fences in order, maintaining stock-proof dykes, burning heather, off-wintering trees.’

  ‘Can’t you make anything from the sheep?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We are selling livestock way below the cost of production. Subsidies were introduced in 1947 when there was rationing and food shortages, and the subsidies continued, along with guaranteed prices, and now even the subsidies aren’t enough. We’ve got the lowest ewe premium price we’ve had for years. In hill farming the income is stuck and the environmental grants are stuck too. Fuel prices are crippling us. We are in a job that doesn’t pay well and we depend on our vehicles. We are responsible for keeping the landscape the way people say they are proud to have it – but who pays for it? The people down the road selling postcards of the Lake District are making much more than the farmers who keep the land so photogenic.’

  Will Cockbain was the same size as the chair he was sitting in. Staring into the fire, he waggled his stocking-soled feet, and blew out his lips. ‘I think Margaret Thatcher saw those guaranteed prices farmers were getting and just hated it,’ he said, ‘and now, though it kills me, we may have to face something: there are too many sheep in the economy. Farmers go down to the market every other week and sell one sheep, and then they give thirty or forty away. They’re not worth anything. There are mass sheep graves everywhere now in the United Kingdom.’ Will laughed and drank his tea. ‘It’s only those with an inbuilt capacity for pain that can stand the farming life nowadays,’ he said. ‘I like the life, but you can’t keep liking it when you’re running against the bank, when things are getting out of control in ways you never dreamed of, relationships falling apart, everything.’

  On the walls of Will Cockbain’s farm there are dozens of rosettes for prize-winning sheep. A picture of Will’s son holding a prize ram hangs beside a grandfather clock made by Simpson of Cockermouth, and an old barometer pointing to Rain. ‘This is a farming community from way back,’ Will said, ‘but they’re all getting too old now. Young men with trained dogs are a rarity, and hill farming, of all kinds, needs young legs. We’ve lost a whole generation to farming. My boys are hanging in there for now, but with, what, £27,000 last year between four men, who could blame them for disappearing?’

  ‘It’s going to be a nightmare if they let farming go the same way as mining,’ said another farmer, ‘but still, we all vote Conservative up here. The Tories were much better to us.’

  *

  As early as 1935 there was panic in the Ministry of Agriculture about the possibility of another war. The First World War had caught British agriculturalists on the hop: this time preparations had to be made. And it was this panic and this mindfulness that set in train the subsidy-driven production that many feel has ruined (and saved) the traditional farming economy in this country, creating an ‘unreal market’ and a falsely sustained industry, the root of today’s troubles. Before the outbreak of war, policies were introduced which favoured the stockpiling of tractors and fertilisers; there were subsidies for anyone who ploughed up permanent grasslands; agricultural workers were released from war duty; and the Women’s Land Army was established. Farming became the Second Front, and the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign extended from public parks to private allotments.

  With the war at sea British food imports dropped by half while the total area of domestic crops increased by 63 per cent: production of some vegetables, such as potatoes, doubled. Farmers in the 1920s had complained that their efforts to increase production in wartime had not been rewarded by an undertaking of long-term government support. The mistake would not be repeated. Promises were made at the start of the second war, and in 1947, with food shortages still in evidence and rationing in place, an Agriculture Act was passed which offered stability and annual price reviews to be monitored by the National Farmers’ Union. Parliament instituted a massive programme of capital investment in farm fabric and equipment, and free advice on the use of new technologies and fertiliser was made available. Water supplies and telephone lines were introduced in many previously remote areas. Farmers working the land in the 1950s and 1960s, though there were fewer and fewer of them, had, it’s true, never had it so good. At the same time increased use of artificial fertilisers and chemical pesticides meant greater yields and what is now thought of as severe environmental damage: motorway bypasses, electricity pylons, larger fields attended by larger machines, with meadows ploughed up, marshes filled in, woods and grasslands usurped by acreage-hungry crops – what the writer Graham Harvey refers to as ‘this once “living tapestry”’ was being turned into ‘a shroud … a landscape of the dead’.

  Government subsidies and grants in wartime, cemented in post-war policy, prepared British farmers for the l
avish benefits they were to enjoy after Britain joined the Common Market in 1973. Today, the Common Agricultural Policy gets a lashing whatever your view of the EU. One side sees quotas and subsidies and guaranteed prices as responsible for overproduction and the creation of a false economy. The other accuses it of being kinder to other European states and not giving enough back to British farmers, a view generally shared by the farmers themselves, but secretly abhorred by the government, which is handing out subsidies. The two sides agree, however, that the CAP doesn’t work, and as I write a new round of reforms is being introduced.

  In 1957, when the Common Market came into being, there was a deficit in most agricultural products and considerable variance in priorities from state to state – some to do with climate and dietary needs, some to do with protectionist tendencies. (British farmers who feel ill served by the CAP often say it was formed too early to suit British needs.) The CAP came into effect in 1964. It was intended to rationalise the chains of supply and demand across member states. This was to be achieved by improving agricultural productivity and promoting technical progress; by maintaining a stable supply of food at regular and sensible prices to consumers; by setting up a common pricing system that would allow farmers in all countries to receive the same returns, fixed above the world market level, for their output. Agricultural commissioners were given the right to intervene in the market where necessary, and a system of variable levies was established to prevent imported goods undercutting EC production. The vexed issue was the common financing system, which still operates today, and which means that all countries contribute to a central market support fund called the European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund, or EAGGF. All market support is paid for centrally out of this fund, with budgetary allocations for each commodity sector. Cash is paid out to producers in member states regardless of the level of a country’s contribution to the fund.

  One consequence of this protectionist jamboree has been an increase, across the board and in all member states, in the variety and quality of available products, from plum tomatoes and cereals to hams and wines and cheeses, with modern supermarkets now carrying a vastly increased range of produce at comparable prices. (This may have pleased British consumers but it hasn’t pleased British farmers, who argue that supermarkets have exploited this abundance, breaking traditional commitments to local producers, and ‘shopping around Europe’ for supplies which could be got in Britain.) A second consequence has been the familiar overstimulated production and the creation of surpluses. It may even be that by continuing to offer not only guaranteed prices but production subsidies to boot, the CAP can be considered one of the chief instigators of the current crisis.

  In the early 1990s European agriculturalists, seeing the need for the CAP to give direct support to an ailing industry – ‘to protect the family farm’, as they often put it – and to protect the environment, began to speak a different language. The European Commission, in its own words,

  recognised that radical reforms were necessary in order to redress the problems of ever-increasing expenditure and declining farm incomes, the build up and cost of storing surplus food stocks and damage to the environment caused by intensive farming methods. A further factor was the tensions which the Community’s farm support policy caused in terms of the EC’s external trade relations. Various measures have been adopted since the mid-1980s to address these problems, e.g. set-aside, production and expenditure quotas on certain products and co-responsibility levies on others. However, these proved inadequate to control the expansion of support expenditure.

  A constant refrain during the Thatcher period was that measures like these would only serve to impede market forces. The bucking of market forces, however, was one of the founding principles of the CAP, and even today, when we finally see the bottom falling out of the system of rewards and grants for overproduction, the tendency is towards ‘relief’ packages, which New Labour support through gritted teeth. It would appear that for a long time now British farming has been faced with two choices: a slow death or a quick one. And not even Thatcher could tolerate a quick one.

  Consumers stand to save more than a billion pounds from the cuts in support prices; and the Blair government is largely in agreement with these proposals, although there are elements which, according to documents available from the Scottish Executive, it finds less than satisfactory:

  While the general proposals for addressing rural policy lack detail, they look innovative and offer possibilities for directing support to rural areas. The downside of the proposals is that the compensation payments look to be too generous, there is no proposal to make farm payments degressive or decoupled from production … The Government has also declared its opposition to an EU-wide ceiling on the amount of direct payments which an individual producer can receive. Because of the UK’s large average farm size, this proposal would hit the UK disproportionately. Elsewhere, there is uncertainty about how the proposals would work in practice. This includes the proposal to create ‘national envelopes’ in the beef and dairy regimes within which Member States would have a certain discretion on targeting subsidies.

  A modern journey across rural Britain doesn’t begin and end with the Common Agricultural Policy. Since the end of the Second World War, and escalating through the period since the formation of the EEC, what we understand as the traditional British landscape has been vanishing before our eyes. Something like 150,000 miles of hedgerow have been lost since subsidies began. Since the underwriting of food production regardless of demand, 97 per cent of English meadowlands have disappeared. There has been a loss of ponds, wetlands, bogs, scrub, flora and fauna – never a dragonfly to be seen, the number of tree sparrows reduced by 89 per cent, of song thrushes by 73 per cent and of skylarks by 58 per cent. ‘Only 20 acres of limestone meadow remain in the whole of Northamptonshire,’ Graham Harvey reports. ‘In Ayrshire only 0.001 per cent remains in meadowland … None of this would have happened without subsidies. Without taxpayers, farm prices would have slipped as production exceeded market demand … Despite years of overproduction, farmers continue to be paid as if their products were in short supply.’

  I set out on my own rural ride feeling sorry for the farmers. I thought they were getting a raw deal: economic forces were against them, they were victims of historical realities beyond their control, and of some horrendous bad luck. They seemed to me, as the miners had once seemed, to be trying to hold on to something worth having, a decent working life, an earning, a rich British culture, and I went into their kitchens with a sense of sorrow. And that is still the case: there is no pleasure to be had from watching farmers work from six until six in all weathers for nothing more rewarding than Income Support. You couldn’t not feel for them. But as the months passed I could also see the sense in the opposing argument: many of the bigger farmers had exploited the subsidy system, they had done well with bumper cheques from Brussels in the 1980s, they had destroyed the land to get the cheques, and they had done nothing to fend off ruin. When I told people I was spending time with farmers, they’d say, ‘How can you stand it? They just complain all day, and they’ve always got their hand out.’ I didn’t want to believe that, and, after talking to the farmers I’ve written about here, I still don’t believe it. But there would be no point in opting for an easy lament on the farmers’ behalf, despite all the anguish they have recently suffered: it would be like singing a sad song for the 1980s men-in-red-braces, who had a similar love of Thatcher, and who did well then, but who are now reaping the rewards of bad management. As a piece of human business, British farming is a heady mixture of the terrible and the inevitable, the hopeless and the culpable, and no less grave for all that.

  Britain is not a peasant culture. It has not been that for over two hundred years. Though we have a cultural resistance to the fact, we are an industrial nation – or, better, a post-industrial one – and part of the agricultural horror we now face has its origins in the readiness with which we industrialised the farming
process. We did the thing that peasant nations such as France did not do: we turned the landscape into American-style prairie, trounced our own ecosystem, and with public money too, and turned some of the biggest farms in Europe into giant, fertiliser-gobbling, pesticide-spraying, manufactured-seed-using monocultures geared only for massive profits and the accrual of EU subsidies. A Civil Service source reminded me that even the BSE crisis has a connection to intensive agribusiness: ‘Feeding animals with the crushed fat and spinal cord of other animals is a form of cheap, industrial, cost-effective management,’ he said, ‘and it would never have happened on a traditional British farm. It is part of the newer, EU-driven, ultra-profiteering way of farming. And look at the results.’ Farms in other parts of Europe, the smaller ones dotted across the Continent, have been much less inclined to debase farming practices in order to reap the rewards of intensification.

  The way ahead is ominous. In a very straightforward sense, in the world at large, GM crops are corrupting the relation of people to the land they live on. Farmers were once concerned with the protection of the broad biodiversity of their fields, but the new methods, especially GM, put land use and food production into the hands of corporations, who are absent from the scene and environmentally careless. By claiming exclusive intellectual property rights to plant breeding, the giant seed companies are gutting entire ecosystems for straight profit. It is happening in India, Algeria, and increasingly in places like Zimbabwe, and it is among the factors threatening to make life hell for the traditional farmers of Yorkshire and Wiltshire.

  In 1998, in a leaked document, a Monsanto researcher expressed great concern about the unpopularity of GM foods with the British public, but was pleased to report that some headway had been made in convincing MPs of their potential benefits. MPs and civil servants, the document says, have little doubt that over the long term things will work out, with a typical comment being: ‘I’m sure in five years’ time everybody will be happily eating genetically modified apples, plums, peaches and peas.’